AdWords & Television = Second Screen Advertising

27 Jan AdWords & Television = Second Screen Advertising

Statistics say that the Internet is one of the few advertising channels in which Italian firms investments still increase rather than decrease (source: Nielsen).
However, investments in online advertising are currently about 13% of those in television. TV still remains the main medium to invest in for many European companies.
Take a deep breath and just go on reading. I know, you are here to read things about AdWords or at least about online advertising. Allow me a few more line, I’m getting there.
The fact is that 75% of Italian frequent internet users are using at least one device connected to the web while watching TV (Ed: and it is more or less the same all over Europe). Why shouldn’t we take advantage of this?
I have had the opportunity to do so. Three times, for two different clients of my company. In all three cases it was a product placement in television programs and the goal of the online campaign was to emphasize the presence of the product on television, still catching the viewer even after his attention has shifted from TV to a smartphone or tablet, following a funnel in which each step has a different message:

The viewer displays the ad whose text refers to what he has just seen on tv (here all is focused on attention hooks);

If the user enters the landing page, the focus of communication shifts to the product;

Subsequent navigation in the user display ads with retargeting is instead finalized to newsletter subscribes (in exchange for something).

When available, I took advantage of the schedule provided by the broadcaster to create at least one search campaign for each episode. Keywords were linked to in-depth searches related to the program and the campaigns were synchronized with the episode in order to be effective since the beginning of transmission until 2 or 3 hours after (and were reactivated for the replicas of the following days).
Of course the offer for mobile devices was higher than the other devices. Campaigns optimization during the first flight had to be of course really minimal: for replicas we sharpened a bit keywords based on search queries generated by the first episode and we could work a little on bids, but there were space for very few thing, due to the short life cycle of campaigns.
The main issue consisted in quite high CPCs because of the low quality score (you should need much more time to achieve decent levels). The reason for the poor overall quality of campaigns it was almost entirely out of our control: first of all, the lack of relevance of the landing page that (for copyright issues) often could not contain any reference to the episode, second, the ad relevance, for the same motive (no references to transmission and conductors). The short life cycle of each campaign – which rarely lasted more than a week – as you can imagine did not help.
All these considerations led me to consider for the future to enable such campaigns only on “disposable” accounts, not to affect the quality of any other campaigns or the customer center itself. To counter balance this limit we enabled campaigns with branded keywords too, referring to the products shown during transmissions (always synchronized with the airing of the program). In this case, ads and landing pages maintained of course a good pertinence and relevance.
In addition to search campaigns in order to “cultivate” the relationship between the brand and the user/viewer, in two out of three cases I have activated remarketing campaigns too (focused to lead generation), that I chose to sync with the episodes in order to obtain the maximum conversion rate possible.
If you are interested in learning more on second screen advertising here is a presentation on the topic by Marco Ziero (one of MOCA associates) at iMetrics Moscow in October 2014.

If you want to know something more about AdWords tactics, feel free to comment this post 😉